About The Team

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Thing A Day 2011 - One Participant's Reflection

Thing-a-day is an open space that enables people to get together virtualy and participate in a creative sprint to make one new thing a day and post it to a collective blog space.

The rules for participations are minimal, everyone is encouraged to select a weekly, monthly or daily challenge and theme for themselves and get to work. You can use ant medium as long as your efforts can be reported back on this blog once a day.

Thing-a-day is a place where everyone can imagine, inspire, create, dream, and present work to a group of peers striving to further their practice. The goal is to make creativity a daily ritual and to help create a digital community of like minded and supporting people.

Everyone is welcome. You're free to sign-up, watch, and comment on the work of other fellow participants. All you have to do is commit to yourself and try your best.

Thing-a-day.com was first launched as a monthly effort to create an ad-hock community of participants willing to sign up for the four weeks of February. 28 eight days to explore 4 themes, mediums or areas of interests and share it with a group of people who had all committed to the same challenge.

The project's initial inspiration came from the work of Ze Frank, who spent a year posting a daily new piece of original content on his personal website zefrank.com. His daily creative endeavor resulted in a all sorts of work. But most importantly, his work brought to the web the long artistic tradition where endurance, perseverance, and hard work as one solid path towards personal, and sometimes professional, fulfillment. Having participated once in such a creative challenge posed by Ze Frank himself in the context of one of his classes at NYU, the (re) creators of this daily thing felt the desire to open up this opportunity to anyone and launched a new iteration of this exercise during the month of February 2007.

An open invitation brought together over a hundred people to sign up for the first iteration of Create-a-thing-a-day. Eighty-nine of those interested, began work on the 1st of February. After 28 days, over 1200 individual posts where created, each one containing an original picture, video, text, or another form of creative act reported by their creators. In 2009, the site moved to Posterous where it is currently hosted.

Making one thing a day has not been a challenge; remembering to photograph and post each day has been the true challenge for me. For me, I should probably adapt it to 7 things a week.

This is the second year that I have participated and I plan to continue participating in future years, as well. I look for inspiration from books, paintings, blogs, movies, fellow crafters, nature, my kitchen, you name it and I find myself looking at all of these things with a new perspective.

Some of the items that I have created become items in my shop. Some of the items become dinner for my family. Thing a day is not limited to art or crafts, it may also include recipes (quite a bit of bread was made this year), lists, snow sculptures, clothing, etc.

Part of the fun of being a part of the community and sharing ideas and creations. You may subscribe to another participant's thing a day pages and then receive daily update via email showing you what they have posted.

I look forward to more local crafters and artisans participating next year. Hope to see you there.